Franklin Graham, son of the famous evangelist, recently warned that the rise of Ebola signaled that we are living in the last days. Few people noticed. Christian filmmaker Paul Lalonde released an awful movie in October about the end of the world. Despite snagging Nicolas Cage for the lead role, Lalonde’s retooling of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’s bestselling Left Behind books fell flat with audiences. Evangelical apocalypticism looks almost dead.

Three new books give fresh insights into the complicated history of evangelical Zionism. Together they present a compelling argument that the founding fathers of the modern state of Israel were not just Theodor Herzl and his Zionist Congress, but American and British evangelicals who exercised tremendous political and economic power in the 19th century—power that modern-day evangelicals like Hagee and his allies can only dream of.